Write of Passage: Revolutionizing Learning

What has made David Perell's sold-out course, Write of Passage, so transformative for learners and what can other Academy, Bootcamp, and Micro-Schools take from his experience?

You're not creating talent, you're building skill

A major distinction that David notes in the messaging for his cohort-based course is he's not teaching you a newfound talent of writing. It's a skill, and it's important your learners know the expectation is for them to learn a new skill.

“Talent is something that you're born with,” David distincts. “A skill is something that can be taught. I was playing tennis this morning, working on my forehand, and that is at some level of talent and some level of skill. But I've been really into the skill side of tennis, and that means that I can actually get better at doing it.”

It's important to be aware of the varying levels of talent your learners are coming to the table with. Some will be born naturals. Others, complete beginners. Creating a great product and curating a learning community around it involves being able to teach a skill that's valuable to a wide range of talents.

“Writing and publishing a blog and writing online — there are elements of talent within it, but I've dissected it into a skill. A lot of people think that writing is just pure art. It's something that can only be taught, and that's wrong. Human society advances. When we take something that we think is an art and we translate it into a skill or into a science.”

Price your cohort-based course based on the value learners will actually receive

Pricing looks very different for every course and every creator, but David knows the curriculum he's put together is designed to create nothing but value. He also hand-selects applicants so there's a very specific correlation between those willing to pay the price for his courses and those wanting to meet deliberate, tangible goals:

“What we do is we get two to 400 of the most ambitious writers in the world that we can find, and then we make the price very expensive so that every single person in the course knows for certain that every other person in passage course is serious. How many $20 eBooks have you bought and then followed through on?,” David asks.

‍Read how On Deck's Eliot Gattegno finds ideal learners.

“Look, for me the high price point allows me to share all of these ideas online. I think that the vast majority of what I do is free. College is way too expensive. But things that cost money, you take seriously. College is really expensive, but most people don't feel the burden of that cost in the moment, which then has them not working as hard.”

If you know your course is worth more than the dollar sign up amount on screen, charge it — and do so boldly. By David's philosophy, bearing the weight of that cost upfront empowers learners to work harder because they know they have to live up to that dollar amount.

In fact, David is so confident in the value of his product that he offers an entire money-back guarantee if your writing skills and career aren't transformed.

Understand the impact of peer learning and cultivate your community to thrive

Any course creator knows the impact of curating a learning community: strength in numbers, accountability, the social impact of kindred learners developing skills alongside one another — but David notes that peer learning is more than a system of accountability.

“We often think of genius as something that happens individually. Steve Jobs was a genius. Bill Gates was a genius. Elon Musk is a genius. We don't often think of genius as something that comes out of an event or a place like minded people. I think it's really worth thinking about — when are those moments created and what do they have in common?”

David goes on to talk about the cultural implications of Enlightenment movements during the 17th and 18th centuries — the original think tanks — and how that inspired movements like Y Combinator and incubators where Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox all got their starts. Peer learning isn't simply about putting people in a room together to toss ideas and create something of them. It's so people can really develop and thrive.

So what do these storied learning communities all have in common?

‍“The first is anti-scale. The second is where weird is cool,” David says. “People come out and say, ‘why doesn't Harvard become bigger? Why doesn't Princeton become bigger?' That's what we try to do with Write of Passage. Rather than expanding the size of the cohort to get thousands and thousands of students, I could probably make more money doing that, but it ruins the scene."

‍There's strength in numbers, but there is also strength in intimate communities that can foster genuine connection.Read how Dribbble creates intimacy between learners with pointed subgroups.

“That size where you can be in breakout rooms and you can look at the other people in the course and you can say ‘I know that person.'  That's what I'm going for, because writing isn't something that you do for five weeks, It's something that you do for your life of a lifetime.”